About Jan

He lives in France, overlooking the vineyards but doesn’t drink. Anyone else would drink. Jan doesn't drink because he wants to feel the entirety of his story, the totality of his karma.

There wasn’t a day that he didn’t think about her, about the life they could have had. About their son, who grew up without a mother. About her mother, who blamed him for her death. He had no choice; he had to leave. He started a new life, new children, new chapters.

But he never closed the chapter from 47 years ago. If he closed it, she would truly die. Thanks to his holding on, she lives. Although he knows he deceives himself, that no one really lives. Everything is beyond time. If he didn’t have courage, he wouldn’t still be alive. Jan has courage.

One summer, his granddaughter, painfully similar to the love of his life, came to his home in France. At the same age, she was when she died. Jan is not afraid to love, he is not afraid to remember. He carries exactly what he must carry. This is his truth; he doesn’t run away, doesn’t close his eyes, he knows that what’s on his shoulders is his. Does he blame himself? Sometimes.

It was July; they went to the forest with the scouts, got soaked, and the documents got completely wet. Their seven-month-old son stayed with his grandmother in the city. It was supposed to be a quick trip, because it was summer, and they needed to be in nature. That night, they dried the documents by candlelight and took advantage of the time without the child. For the first time in a long time, they were alone. They made love by candlelight and quickly fell asleep.

He doesn’t remember exactly what woke them, he remembers protecting her with his body from the fire, the tent melted onto his skin. The scouts tried to pull them out, the flames were bursting. The night was summer, calm. That hell that opened lasted twenty-five minutes or an eternity.

Nothing afterward, nothing later had such justification, such destructive force. Faith in God, faith in fire, faith in help, faith in helplessness. Everything happened suddenly. Jan acted. As a young boy, he was in the resistance. Action was simple for Jan. He almost lost his hand, gangrene set in. The doctor, who was operating with one hand, went on vacation and sent a replacement. Then Jan was still fighting. He thought of her, of their son at home. What a nightmare, it must pass, he thought.

She died suddenly, without visible external injuries, without warning. The girl scouts remember visiting her in the hospital, that she was sitting on the bed, laughing. What happened? Her son asked his grandmother years later, the one who blamed Jan for her daughter’s death, his mother. What happened? Fire inside, hell in the lungs. The girl scouts didn’t believe it was she who died, and Jan survived.

Jan doesn’t believe it either. He started another family, had more children, but he never let her go. He still holds her in his arms, protecting her body from hell, protecting their son from losing his mother. Jan hasn’t forgiven himself; Jan has the courage to live with it and not drink wine. He looks out the window at the vineyards of France and gets tangled in those vines, his memories from that summer night more vivid than the life that came after the hell.